The present invention relates generally to computer networks, and more particularly to building a network site.
The Internet is a world-wide network of interlinked networks connected by specific protocols (e.g., the Internet Protocol (IP)). The Internet provides for file transfer, remote login, electronic mail, news and other services. The World Wide Web (the "Web") is a hypertext based system for finding and accessing Internet resources. Hypertext refers to specific content elements within a document that contain links to other documents. A user desiring to retrieve information from the Web invokes a browser, a client program that runs on a client computer (Windows, Mac or UNIX environment), allowing a user to display documents retrieved from the Web.
Information is organized on the Web in web sites. A web site is a collection of linked files resident on a server that may be accessed by a browser application. Typically, the web site contains a initial page (the "home page"), which is displayed when the browser first accesses the site. The web site may include one or more other pages which may be accessed by selecting links resident on the home page or other pages within the web site.
The process of constructing a web site includes identifying content for display, structuring the content, building the web site, and transferring the final product to a web server. The process of building the web site includes creating the hypertext mark-up language (HTML) associated with the links for a particular page of content.
After a web site has been constructed, the HTML files (pages) are stored in a file structure. As was described above, the pages of the web site contain one or more links to other pages in the site. The links provide a navigational structure for traversing pages in the web site.
Over time, a user may desire to alter the appearance of one or more pages in the web site. The alteration may be due to changes in the content desired to be displayed or changes driven therefrom. A user desiring to alter the appearance of any page in the web site typically creates a new page in HTML with the revised content. Alternatively, the user may revise an existing HTML file associated with a given page changing any desired content elements and any links.
When changes are made to a page (the "modified page"), links to other pages on the modified page may be changed. In addition, links pointing to the modified page which are located on other pages in the web site may be required to be changed. Often, users start from scratch constructing an entire new web site depending on the magnitude of changes to the existing web site pages.
Conventional web site construction tools do not afford a designer flexibility in making changes to existing web sites. Part of the reason for this is the nature of the web site files.
Typically, the HTML files stored in the file structure are not physically linked and may be ordered in any fashion desired. The linking of pages in the web site is hard coded and embedded in the HTML for each file. At build time for a web site, links are calculated based on the location of the page being called.
However, while there is no requirement to physically link or order files in the file structure, designers tend to build web sites in a structured manner, providing an inherent logical ordering to the files stored in the file structure. Conventional web site build tools do not take advantage of this inherent structure during the build or rebuild process. As such, rebuilding web sites with conventional tools often necessitates the rebuilding of the entire web site in order to establish a different relationship between individual pages in the web site.